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Seeking latitude to press liberal causes, the Jewish Council for Public Affairs distances itself from federations
WASHINGTON (JTA) — The Jewish Council for Public Affairs, the onetime standard-bearer for outreach to the non-Jewish world whose influence has waned, is loosening its financial and organizational ties to the Jewish Federations of North America in a bid to reassert its traditional role.
The decision announced Monday to go it alone, announced in a press release and a two-page brochure that will go out to Jewish organizations, will free the JCPA to pursue liberal agenda items that are favored by American Jews but can alienate or unsettle donors to the federation system who are more conservative or at least more cautious about maintaining an appearance of being nonpartisan.
The decision marks a resolution to tensions that surged in 2020, when JCPA was among 600 Jewish groups to sign onto a full-page New York Times ad declaring “Black Lives Matter.” That set off alarms among some conservative donors because of the anti-Israel positions adopted by some of the Black Lives Matter movement’s leading individuals and organizations.
As a result, JCPA and JFNA entered into talks about their shared future. Insiders said last year, as tensions burst into public view, that it was likely that the ailing JCPA would fold wholly into JFNA.
Instead, after a process that included officials from both groups as well as from local Jewish community relations councils, which are mostly controlled by their local Jewish federations, the decision was to tease apart the organizations. The decision means that JCPA will no longer officially speak on behalf of the community relations councils, and also will not draw dues from them or from the 16 national organizations that have funded it up to now.
But while the group will take on a fundraising challenge, those who engineered the new structure say it will also be insulated from the difficulties of arriving at a consensus in an increasingly polarized political environment.
Rabbi Doug Kahn, the retired longtime director of the San Francisco Jewish Community Relations Council who was a consultant in the restructuring, said the new arrangement is meant to offer a positive answer to the question, “Can we move forward in a way that enables us to be more impactful on our core issues, and more nimble at the same time, while retaining close relationships with our key stakeholders going forward?”
Rori Pickler Neiss, who heads the St. Louis JCRC, was among a number of local community relations council directors who had lost hope that the JCPA could adequately represent them. Now she said, she was hopeful it could resume its role of convening a national Jewish consensus around critical issues.
“The model of consensus-building in the way that some of the mainstream organizations talk about it has really been consensus towards a very narrow group of voices that wants to claim representation of the entire Jewish community,” she said. The newly constituted JCPA “is opening itself up to what could be greater consensus in a sense of a much broader community than many of our models have allowed for.”
The brochure tied to the split indicates some of the issues on which the renewed JCPA will advocate. “JCPA will represent a strong independent voice within the American Jewish community on issues aimed at strengthening our democracy and commitment to an inclusive and just society out of the belief that such conditions are essential in a pluralistic society and for the well-being of the Jewish people and Israel,” it said. “The reset takes place against a backdrop of rising antisemitism, racism, bigotry and hate, and polarization, and continued threats to our democracy.”
The group is launching two new initiatives, both apparently likely to dismay conservatives. One would focus on “voting rights, election integrity, disinformation, extremism as a threat to democracy, and civics education.” The other would focus on “racial justice, criminal justice reform and gun violence, LGBTQ rights, immigration rights, reproductive rights, and fighting hate violence.”
Some of the 16 groups that have paid dues to the JCPA in the past are supporting the restructured group. The new JCPA will rely at first on a three-year commitment from the UJA Federation of New York, one of the biggest pillars of the JFNA.
It’s not clear yet how the more conservative among the 16 groups will react. Nathan Diament, the Washington director for the Orthodox Union, said his group would wait and see how the new JCPA develops. But he said he regretted the polarization that led to the change.
“The trajectory of that JCPA is a reflection of the of the broader trend, more than anything about the JCPA itself,” Diament said. “It’s harder to find consensus these days with regards to Israel, it’s harder to find consensus with regard to a large list of domestic policy matters. I mean, even while we were in the JCPA we were in the position of having to dissent on some prominent issues.”
David Bohm, the current JCPA chairman who led the restructuring talks, said the organization would remain nonpartisan — but acknowledged that it’s become harder to maintain the perception.
“In today’s polarized environment, people get accused of being partisan when they take a stand on any issue, so I don’t know if that can be totally avoided,” he said in an interview.
The JFNA in a statement welcomed the new configuration. “We look forward to continuing to work collaboratively with JCPA — as we always have — as it tackles issues of importance to Jewish communities in its new format.”
In an interview, Elana Broitman, JFNA’s senior vice president for public affairs, said the new configuration would allow the JCPA to delve deeper on its favored issues. “If the JCPA is focused on particular issues, they can perhaps go into more depth on those issues that they had the opportunity to before,” she said.
In the past, the JCPA has taken positions on issues like voting rights, gun control, immigration rights and abortion, because they were favored by the local JCRCs with which it consulted and which sent delegates to its annual conference. Those JCRCs often initiated liberal policies, in part because they were favored by an American Jewish grassroots that polls show trends overwhelmingly liberal.
Another factor was the give and take in local community relations: Jewish groups seeking support for Jewish issues from Black, Latino, Asian American and other minority groups were happy to reciprocate on those groups’ favored issues.
But the JCPA’s profile on those issues has diminished in recent years; the smaller donor base triggered by the 2008 recession forced the vast majority of JCRCs to fold into their local federations, and to reflect the priorities of the federation donor base as opposed to the congregations, Jewish labor groups and fraternal organizations that once drove the agenda for Jewish community relations.
Tensions between the JCPA and the JFNA intensified in the summer of 2020, after a Minneapolis policeman murdered George Floyd, triggering civil rights protests and the “Black Lives Matter” ad by Jewish groups that JCPA signed onto.
The JFNA CEO, Eric Fingerhut, insiders said then, was not happy about having to explain to donors why JCPA was embracing a group identified closely with a movement perceived by some conservatives as radical and anti-Israel.
The new JCPA is betting that there are donors ready to support a progressive domestic Jewish lobby. In addition to the three-year grant from UJA-Federation, two other grants will come from a past chairwoman of the JCPA, Lois Frank, and its current chairman, Bohm.
Bohm, an attorney who assumed leadership of the JCPA in 2021, said the group would take a hit by losing the JFNA’s allocations and the dues it collects from the 125 community relations councils — but he expected to make it up with money from foundations invested in the the JCPA’s new agenda, including from individual federations.
“We expect we may lose some funding,” he said. “We’re hoping it’s not significant.”
“We are beginning to hear from foundations that have not historically necessarily focused on community relations, but now recognize why that is such an important part in the toolkit,” Kahn added.
Bohm said the board would be independent and limited to 30 people. “We will continue to have board members who are either JCRC directors or current or past chairs of JCRCs, but they will not be representing their specific community,” he said in an email after the interview. “Instead they will represent the Jewish community relations field as a whole.”
JCPA’s annual budget is now less than $2 million, Kahn said, down from nearly $4 million in 2015, and its staff has dropped from 13 in the 2000s to four. The group is seeking a fifth staffer now and hope eventually to employ at least 13.
Beyond polarization, a number of factors have been at play in diminishing the role of consensus-based Jewish community relations. There has been a flourishing of single-issue nonprofit groups, many of them Jewish, that are more attractive to donors than general interest groups.
Kahn noted that in the mid-1990s when many of the agenda items the national Jewish community pursued for decades seemed to be resolving themselves: Peace was breaking out between Israel and its neighbors, the Soviet Union collapsed and freed its Jews to travel, immigration reform was on track and race relations appeared to be improving.
“There was this shift from focusing on the external challenges or threats to more of the internal threats within the Jewish community,” he said, referring to an emphasis on Jewish education to counter assimilation.
The fragility of the hopes for peace and democratic growth in the 1990s were made evident in subsequent years with the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the eruption of the Second Intifada and the rise of nativist sentiment and its attendant bigotries, culminating in the Trump presidency.
Kahn said his hope was that the JCPA would once again assume the role it played from 1944, when it was founded as the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council: raising Holocaust awareness and taking the lead in promoting immigration in the late 1940s, establishing the Black-Jewish alliance in the 1950s, defending Israel in the 1960s, and advocating for Soviet Jewry until the USSR’s collapse.
He saw hope in the turnout of non-Jewish support for Jews after the recent deadly attacks on Jewish institutions, including the gunman who massacred 11 worshipers in Pittsburgh in 2018. “I think this model will enable that kind of solidarity-building around issues of common cause to grow infinitely greater than it’s been able to, up until now,” he said.
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More Troubling Anti-Israel Activity Occurs at North Carolina Colleges, Possibly Violating State Law
North Carolina State University. Photo: Wiki Commons.
Twenty professors currently working at public universities in North Carolina have pledged to promote the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel “in the classroom and on campus.”
The pledge characterized Israel as a “settler colonial state.”
All 20 are employed by the University of North Carolina (UNC) System, which is required by State law and the UNC equality policy to be institutionally neutral “on the political controversies of the day.” All 20 signed the BDS pledge using their UNC System credentials.
As reported last week, one of these professors, Kristen Alff, is currently teaching the “History of the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict” at NC State University (NCSU).
Alff is the only professor currently teaching at NCSU who signed the BDS pledge. Nevertheless, she was chosen to teach the course on Israel, which suggests to the community that the university has an anti-Israel agenda.
Dr. Stanley Robboy, Professor Emeritus of Pathology at Duke University, wrote to UNC System President Peter Hans and other officials about Alff’s course: “Is it not curious that NC State has chosen the one historian among its ranks who openly calls Israel a colonial settler state and publicly supports the BDS movement to teach its course on Israel?”
A local professional wrote to university officials, “As a recipient of federal funding, the university [NCSU] is subject to Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which obligates institutions to address conduct that may create a hostile environment for Jewish students, including antisemitism related to shared ancestry or ethnic characteristics.”
A parent of two NCSU graduates wrote to Dean Deanna Dannels: “University leadership needs to step up and stop this biased teaching against Israel … This is teaching Jew Hatred.”
The UNC System appears dismissive of such concerns. The Vice President for Communications told me: “Faculty have wide latitude in how they teach about controversial issues. Expectations of neutrality do not apply to individual scholars in the same way that they do to institutional leaders.”
I contacted most of the 20 professors who signed the pledge. One wrote back that he doesn’t “advocate” for any political cause in the classroom, but refused to remove himself from the list. Besides one other vague response I got, the rest of the professors refused to comment.
Due to space constraints, I will highlight just two more of the 20 UNC System professors who pledged to advance BDS “in the classroom and on campus.”
In 2023, I attended an infamous UNC event, in which one of the invited speakers called Oct. 7 a “beautiful day” and spoke with pride and admiration for Hamas.
Sara Smith, who signed the BDS pledge using her UNC-Chapel Hill credentials, served as moderator and host of the event.
From what I observed, it didn’t appear to me that one person in the room — including Smith — appeared troubled by the enthusiastic endorsement of Hamas.
Several panelists openly agreed with the vile, pro Hamas comments. At no point did Smith or any other UNC faculty member or participant challenge this public support of Hamas or say to the students in attendance, “There was nothing beautiful about Hamas’ murder and rapes that day.” Audience questions were not permitted, which meant that the pro-Hamas comments went completely unchallenged.
Within a week of my event report, UNC-Chapel Hill’s provost at the time wrote a blistering letter of concern to faculty and officials, saying, “One thing is clear: from the outside, the academy appears to be fostering a banal kind of evil.”
UNC apologized repeatedly for this event.
Nadia Yaqub also signed the BDS pledge using her UNC-Chapel Hill credentials. In 2024, I attended a UNC event that Yaqub moderated and hosted. From what I observed, it seemed she was in charge.
As I reported at the time, all five panelists were anti-Israel radicals. Four panelists had signed the BDS pledge and the fifth had signed an anti-Israel statement. Students and the community were provided a one-sided demonization of Israel that ignored the legal requirement of institutional neutrality without including a single pro-Israel or even neutral voice to challenge the biased panel and the two hours of Israel-bashing speeches.
About 55 seconds into her opening remarks, Yaqub told the audience that Israel is fighting “Palestinian resistance groups.” Not a single panelist spoke up to disagree, and to let the audience know that the United States and many other countries had designated Hamas as a terrorist organization.
That same year, Yaqub spoke at a UNC Faculty Council meeting to oppose a resolution titled “Condemning Antisemitism on Campus.”
Yaqub and Smith were each contacted for this column and did not respond.
The UNC System and the North Carolina legislature must initiate comprehensive investigations to ascertain whether any professors are fulfilling their pledges to utilize taxpayer-funded public classrooms and campuses for the purpose of boycotting, divesting, and sanctioning Israel. The US Department of Education also needs to launch an investigation to determine if Jewish and pro-Israel students and scholars are being discriminated against in North Carolina public universities.
Peter Reitzes writes about antisemitism in North Carolina and beyond.
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Israeli President, Jewish Leaders Meet to Discuss Diaspora Strengthening Support for Judaism, Israel
Senior leadership members of the Aish organization met with Israeli President Isaac Herzog at the President’s Residence in Jerusalem on Jan. 14, 2026. Photo: Haim Zach/GPO
Senior leaders of the Jewish educational organization Aish met with Israeli President Isaac Herzog at his residence in Jerusalem on Wednesday to discuss Jews in the diaspora and their engagement with Israel following the deadly Hamas-led terrorist attack in the country on Oct. 7, 2023.
The discussion focused on the increase of Jews seeking connection, education, and a sense of community with their Jewish peers and Israel in the immediate aftermath of the Oct. 7 attack. The term “Oct. 8 Jews” was coined to describe Jews who had the desire to strengthen their Jewish identity and/or relationship to Israel after the 2023 massacre. However, Aish and other Jewish organizations have noticed that has time has passed, maintaining that sense of connection to Judaism and Israel has become difficult.
“The wave is there; we need to bring our efforts together across the Jewish world to sustain the newfound sense of Judaism and Zionism and strengthen it,” Aish CEO Rabbi Burg told Herzog during Wednesday’s meeting.
“After Oct. 7, we witnessed something remarkable,” he added. “Oct. 7 shattered our sense of security, but it also awakened something profound in the Jewish soul. Jews who had never felt connected to their heritage searched for meaning. Students on college campuses who once stayed silent became the defenders of both Judaism and the State of Israel. Families began observing Shabbat, and Jews began expressing their faith and connection to Israel in a myriad of ways, showing who we truly are as a people. At Aish, we’ve built our entire mission around this movement, creating pathways for every Jew to discover the depth, wisdom, and beauty of our tradition.”
Burg and other Aish leaders presented Herzog with the organization’s plan to combat this challenge through the use of technological and educational initiatives. The strategy includes using learning tools driven by artificial intelligence that can, for example, provide personalized Jewish education, long and short-form content to reach Jewish social media users, and conversational platforms that can answer questions about Jewish law, history, and philosophy.
“Aish recognized that waiting for Jews to seek out educational institutions may no longer be sufficient in an era when much of Jewish identity formation happens through screens, and we pivoted accordingly,” Burg said.
During Wednesday’s meeting, Aish leaders and Israel’s president also discussed the antisemitism that Jewish students have faced on university campuses following the Oct. 7 attack, and Aish shared the resources they need to support students who are targeted.
“I congratulate Aish on their impressive and impactful work in the field of Jewish education in Israel and around the world,” Herzog said in a released statement. “Since Oct. 7, Aish’s broad-ranging efforts to engage Jews with authentic educational experiences and meaningful online Jewish content have become more important than ever. May Aish continue to go from strength to strength.”
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Israel to Honor Charlie Kirk at Antisemitism Conference
Senior Advancement Director at Turning Point USA Stacy Sheridan speaks next to a portrait of slain conservative commentator Charlie Kirk during his memorial service at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona, US, Sept. 21, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Caitlin O’Hara
The State of Israel will posthumously give Charlie Kirk an award for his efforts to combat antisemitism at the 2026 International Conference on Combating Antisemitism in Jerusalem, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office announced on Wednesday.
The honor comes amid an effort by the so-called “new” political right, including voices such as podcaster Candace Owens, to rewrite the history of Kirk’s conservative activism and rebrand him as someone preparing to turn against Israel in the days before his assassination on the campus of Utah Valley University in September.
Their revisionism, however, obscures the fact that Kirk was an ardent supporter of Israel throughout his career, taking on activists of both the far left and far right who promoted rising antisemitism and sought to undermine the US-Israel alliance.
“There’s a dark Jew hate out there, and I see it,” Kirk told a student during a podcast episode which aired in 2025. “Don’t get yourself involved in that. I’m telling you it will rot your brain. It’s bad for your soul. It’s bad. It’s evil. I think it’s demonic.”
Following Kirk’s death Netanyahu issued a statement which praised the US activist for “speaking truth and defending freedom” and noted that the two had set tentative plans for him to visit Israel.
“A lion-hearted fiend of Israel, he fought the lies and stood tall for Judeo-Christian civilization,” the Israeli premier said. “We lost an incredible human being. His boundless pride in America and his valiant belief in free speech will leave a lasting impact.”
Born on Oct. 14, 1993, in Arlington Heights, Illinois, Kirk formally entered the political arena in 2012, five months before the reelection of former US President Barack Obama, to found Turning Point USA (TPUSA) — which served as a bellwether of declining youth support for the progressive consensus on race, free speech, and economics that took hold in American college campuses in the 1960s.
TPUSA grew rapidly, challenging campus primacy of the College Republicans organization and exuding confidence in conservative ideas at a moment when political scientists and other experts speculated that the Republican Party would decline to the point that the Democratic Party would achieve long-standing majorities in local and federal government.
Far-right activists have attempted to distort Kirk’s legacy, with figures such as Tucker Carlson implying that he was murdered by “guys sitting around eating hummus” in Jerusalem and Owens suggesting Israel was behind his death.
There has been so evidence to support such claims. Tyler Robinson, 22, has been charged for murdering Kirk and potentially faces the death penalty. He was romantically involved with his transgender roommate, and prosecutors have reportedly argued that Kirk’s anti-trans rhetoric was a key factor that allegedly led him to shoot the Turning Point USA founder.
Experts have argued that far-right efforts to distort Kirk’s stance on Israel and antisemitism are part of an effort to undermine not only the US-Israel alliance but Washington’s leadership in the world more broadly.
“It’s antisemitism for the purpose of undermining Americans’ confidence in ourselves and in our post- World War II role in the world,” Hudson Institute scholar Rebeccah Heinrichs said during a conference on antisemitism held in Washington, DC in December. “That is very dangerous because we can’t come to consensus on anything else we need from a grand strategy perspective if American scapegoat our problems to the Jews and if they believe that Israel is no longer an ally but it never was, and in fact that we were on the wrong side of World War II, which is now the narrative being pushed.”
Meanwhile, antisemitism is surging across the US.
This past weekend, a 19-year-old suspect, Stephen Pittman, was arrested for allegedly igniting a catastrophic fire which decimated the Beth Israel Congregation synagogue in Jackson, Mississippi. According to court filings, he told US federal investigators that he targeted the building over its “Jewish ties.”
“This latest deplorable crime against a Jewish institution reminds us that the same hatred that motivated the KKK to attack Beth Israel in 1967 is alive today,” the Florida Holocaust Museum said in a statement shared with The Algemeiner following news of Pittman’s arrest. “Antisemitism is still trying to intimidate Jews, drive them out of public life, and make houses of worship targets of violence instead of place of safety and community.”
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) recorded 9,354 antisemitic incidents in 2024 — an average of 25.6 a day — across the US, providing statistical proof of what has been described as an atmosphere of hate not experienced in the nearly 50 years since the organization began tracking such data in 1979. Incidents of harassment, vandalism, and assault all increased by double digits, and for the first time ever a majority of outrages — 58 percent — were related to the existence of Israel as the world’s only Jewish state.
The FBI disclosed similar numbers, showing that even as hate crimes across the US decreased overall, those perpetrated against Jews increased by 5.8 percent in 2024 to 1,938, the largest total recorded in over 30 years of the FBI’s counting them. Jewish American groups have noted that this rise in antisemitic hate crimes, which included 178 assaults, is being experienced by a demographic group which constitutes just 2 percent of the US population.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.